Gangster girlfriends: Women trapped by fatal love

Kim Bolan, Vancouver Sun11.13.2010

Brianna Kinnear, who was fatally shot last year in Coquitlam. Police still don't know if the burst of bullets on Feb. 3, 2009 was meant for Brianna, 22, her jailed boyfriend, Jesse Margison, or her friend Tiffany Bryan, whose truck she was driving.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Brianna Kinnear is one of a growing number of young B.C. women who have paid the ultimate price for love — ending up dead because their boyfriends are caught up in gangs, drugs and violence.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Brianna Kinnear in her high school graduation dress.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Brianna Kinnear with Ferdinand, her pet Malti-poo.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Brianna Kinnear on her 21st birthday.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Brianna Helen Kinnear was shot to death in Coquitlam.Global BC
/ Global BC

Mandy Astin Johnson, who was gunned down in a car in Abbotsford on July 28, and boyfriend Gator Browne. Browne, who was uninjured in the deadly shooting of Johnson, has admitted on his Facebook page that he was the intended target.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Gator Browne, who was uninjured in the deadly July 2010 shooting of girlfriend Many Johnson, has admitted on his Facebook page that he was the intended target. And he has threatened to name the killers on the social-networking site. He has not cooperated with police.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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Police investigate an Abbotsford shooting that left Mandie Astin Johnson dead on July 28, 2010. The incident was reported at 3 a.m. on Polar Avenue near Townline Road - a rural area north of the city centre.Special to the Vancouver Sun
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A photo downloaded from Facebook of Nikki Alemy who was gunned down in Surrey.Files
/ Vancouver Sun

Surrey RCMP investigate the scene at 148th and 96th avenue in Surrey, Feb. 16 where a woman and child were in a car which was the target of a shooting. The woman, Nicole Alemy died, but her four-year-old child was unhurt.Ward Perrin
/ Vancouver Sun

METRO VANCOUVER — Hours before 22-year-old Brianna Kinnear was fatally shot last year, she fought with her mom over the one topic that always divided them: the young woman’s gangster boyfriend.

“In my last text to her we were just arguing about the whole lifestyle — almost to the point where I said I had supported her, but maybe I had got to start being a little tougher,” Carol Kinnear recalled recently. “Not that I would ever have let her out of my life.”

It was a decision she didn’t have to make. By late that afternoon, the pretty young woman who loved soccer and her little Malti-poo, Ferdinand, had been executed on Coquitlam’s Oxford Street in a targeted hit.

Police still don’t know if the burst of bullets on Feb. 3, 2009 was meant for Brianna, her jailed boyfriend, Jesse Margison, or her friend Tiffany Bryan, whose truck she was driving.

One thing Carol Kinnear is now sure of: Brianna was wrong to believe that girlfriends of gangsters are somehow immune to the violence.

“She never thought she would get killed. She would say, ‘It doesn’t happen to girls,’” Kinnear said, her voice breaking. “I am pretty sure that if she had seconds before she died ... she would have just been appalled and said, ‘I love you mom and I am sorry.’”

Disturbing development

Brianna Kinnear is one of a growing number of young B.C. women who have paid the ultimate price for love — ending up dead because their boyfriends are caught up in gangs, drugs and violence. One police chief laments that many of these young women don’t realize what they are getting into. A counsellor says fleeing can be dangerous, arguing for the creation of a special transition house for young women trying to leave gangster boyfriends.

Twenty-two-year-old Mandie Astin Johnson was gunned down in a car in Abbotsford on July 28, 2010.

Jessica Amber Illes, 23, was shot to death in an Abbotsford basement suite Aug. 30, 2009.

Nicole Marie Alemy, 23, was executed in Surrey on Feb. 16, 2009 with her four-year-old in the back seat of her car.

Brittany Joan Giese, 19, was killed in a Prince George house on Oct. 6, 2008.

And Lexi Madsen, 26, died from gunfire on Aug. 28, 2005 in a Honda near the University of the Fraser Valley, from which she had just graduated.

Three of the six young women were moms. Three were with their boyfriends when targeted. In two of those cases, the men also were killed. No one has been charged in any of the murders.

Abbotsford Police Chief Bob Rich said slayings of young women motivated primarily by their association with a gangster is a disturbing development.

“The rules we thought that the world lived by 10 years ago are not the rules we think they live by now,” Rich said. “If you can’t make an easy target of the gangster, then killing that person’s girlfriend is a good option, from their perspective. That seems to be the game.”

Abbotsford counsellor Cecilia Codoceo is working with several young women who have sought help over a relationship with a gang member.

“You have these women who want to get out. They have the will. And yet they are facing someone with unlimited resources to stop them. It is almost an impossible situation. And those who get out are lucky,” she said.

Carol Kinnear is also disturbed by the trend — so much so that she agreed to an exclusive interview despite her frustration about the way her daughter was portrayed by the media after her slaying.

“There is really no help for these girls,” Kinnear said.

Nor is there support for families grappling with how to extricate their loved one from the potentially violent situation.

From the moment Brianna met Jesse Margison in her Grade-12 year, her mother was deeply troubled by the relationship. Mutual friends brought them together while Brianna was finishing school at Coquitlam’s Terry Fox secondary.

“She kind of befriended him and he was hiding out from the police and she encouraged him to turn himself in,” Kinnear said.

Brianna was a popular teen and not in any trouble during her school years. She was a soccer star who was looking forward to the end of high school, with plans to train as an esthetician.

“She lit up a room,” her mom says. “She was a beautiful girl and everybody loved her. She had a vivacious smile. She was very warm-hearted.”

At first, the two were just friends, but it evolved into a deeper relationship.

“I remember when Brianna started dating Jesse. She had him at the house and I said to her, ‘You can’t have him here.’ I went to the police and asked for a restraining order and they said, ‘Well, if she invited him into your house, there is nothing we can do.’”

Carol Kinnear found herself in a difficult dilemma. She wanted Margison out of her daughter’s life, but she didn’t want to push her daughter away.

“Because she wasn’t allowed to have him here, she moved. She was almost 19.”

The lure of money

It was the spring of 2005.

Kinnear suspected that Margison and Brianna’s friend Tiffany Bryan were already involved in the drug trade.

“The pull of the money was huge,” she said. “People flash money at you and they buy you with stuff.”

All of a sudden, Brianna had money to eat out. There was a trip to Mexico. Kinnear would question Brianna about the source of the cash and get ambiguous answers about low-paying jobs.

At first, Brianna was still intent on having a career.

“She took the esthetician’s course ... And she was offered to become an instructor and she actually got a student loan to pay for the course. But she never stuck to it,” Kinnear said.

Margison was a smooth-talker and smart. But Kinnear still doesn’t fully understand the hold the young man with a lengthy criminal record had over her daughter.

“Jesse had a really terrible upbringing. He has basically been on his own from a very young age,” she said. “So I think in the beginning it was a little bit of a maternal thing, right? I could be wrong. It could have been the ‘bad boy’ pull. That could be why a lot of these girls hook up with these guys.”

She worried Brianna was not being treated well.

“I know he cheated on her. But these guys think it is okay, right? They think it is their right — they are above everything, including the law.”

As time passed, Kinnear tried talking to Margison.

“I would say, you know, ‘Why don’t you get out of this?’ He is a very intelligent boy. He could have done lots of stuff with his life. And he would always say: ‘I just need this much money and then I will do that.’ ”

Tense as things got, Margison was always invited to family dinners.

“I was not going to push my daughter away. I knew one day she was going to need me and there were many times where she needed me.”

She would visit her daughter at apartments she shared with Margison. He was never there, until curfew time in the late evening.

“It would be a beautiful sunny day and the blinds were closed and I would go and open them and I would say, ‘Brianna, how can you live like this with the blinds closed?’ And she would say that was the way that it was. And nobody could know where they lived. And I just didn’t understand that,” Kinnear said.

As a mother, she struggled with the conflict of wanting to know what was going on in her daughter’s life, yet fearing too much knowledge was dangerous.

Criminal records

In February 2007, Brianna was charged with possession for the purpose of trafficking, along with Margison and Bryan. Kinnear was devastated.

While she knows Brianna was involved in Margison’s business, she said for the most part the young woman tried to stay away from a direct role. But her name had been on the lease of the apartment in which the drugs were stashed.

“She had said to me that Jesse was going to plead guilty and take all the blame, and she wouldn’t have any charges. Well, at the last minute he decided no. So all of a sudden she has got these charges. I know it really brought her down because she has always really wanted to go to Disneyland and stuff like that and now she knew she couldn’t,” Kinnear said.

In December 2007, Margison was critically wounded in a shooting at a Coquitlam townhouse complex.

“She called me and I met her at the hospital, sat in the waiting room with her,” Kinnear said. “I guess they were surprised he even made it to the hospital alive.”

The shooting was a wake-up call but, by then, Brianna didn’t know how to extricate herself.

“I think she was worried. I think even sometimes she was totally depressed about the situation, but didn’t know how to get out of it,” Kinnear said.

She would leave Margison, but he would convince her to return. Like many of the young women caught in the cycle, Brianna would use OxyContin when things were bad. The prescription drug is like heroin, numbing the senses and creating a sense of euphoria. It is highly addictive.

“Brianna needed the help of the addiction doctor. And then when things would go rough with Jesse, she would go back on them,” Kinnear said.

Margison was in jail at various times during the couple’s three-year relationship.

“I totally think she was the happiest when Jesse was in jail,” Kinnear said. “Because she could write her letters, but she could still live her life. [Then] she was excited when he would get out.”

In fact, during one of those periods just a few months before being gunned down, Brianna made what her mother hoped was a final decision to leave him. She kept her new address secret from everyone but her family.

“Jesse actually had her trailed until he found out where she lived,” Kinnear said. “She would take two steps forward and one step back. I think she just needed a bit more time.”

When Brianna was being sentenced on her 2007 trafficking charges, just weeks before she was killed, she asked her mom for a letter to the judge.

“I just said, ‘You know honey, I can’t give you a letter. What can I tell him or her? You don’t have a job. You are still visiting Jesse and I can’t give you a letter.’ It was a hard thing not to do, but I wanted her to understand that I support her but I don’t support her choices,” Kinnear said. “I am not sorry that I didn’t give her the letter. I wasn’t going to lie for her in that situation and I think she understood that.”

Even when things were the roughest, Carol Kinnear always told her daughter how much she loved her. They were in constant contact. It was as if Brianna had two lives: the loving, close family life and the life with her “friends.”

“I would wake up in the morning and the first thing I would do is look in my phone because I would always have a text from her. Sometimes it was like, you know ... sad texts like she would be really upset about her relationship with Jesse and other times it would be nice. She always, always told me she loved me,” Kinnear said.

Bad choices

Abbotsford’s Chief Rich has seen young women like Brianna Kinnear with dangerous gangsters while out doing bar checks with his officers.

“I feel the hairs stand up on my back and neck for these young women, who are making the choice to associate with these guys. They are making really bad choices,” Rich said. “It is a fun night out and there is lots of status associated with being in that part of the bar with those people. But they are really, really not looking past what happens at 2 a.m. that day.”

When Mandie Johnson was shot to death in July, Rich went to the scene near Poplar Avenue and Townline Road.

“I was standing on a rural street looking into the car where Mandie Johnson had just lost her life, thinking she was just along for the ride in more ways than one,” Rich said.

“You can’t be naive about why are you meeting other people at 3:30 in the morning on a rural road. It is not to discuss a legitimate business proposition. She is obviously aware of what is going on. So she is allowing herself to be along for the ride.

“On the other side, this is not a person who is committing criminal acts. This is not a criminal. She was a girlfriend. Full stop. This was a horrible choice on her part.”

Boyfriend Gater Browne, who was uninjured in the deadly shooting, has admitted on his Facebook page that he was the intended target. And he has threatened to name the killers and openly plotted revenge.

“Hey you goofs, why don’t you come finish what you started and do it rite this time but instead you kill my old laddy and not me now i am going to make your lifes not worth living,” Browne wrote on Oct. 6. “Or should i plaster your ... names all over face book so everyone knows who murdered mandie who wants to know who did this to mandie?”

Browne, 31, has a long history with police. He was out on bail on charges of theft, possession of stolen property and trespassing at night when Johnson was killed. On Sept. 17, Browne posted an ominous message on Facebook: “You know i know who killed my girl and its on goofs its on.”

Some of Johnson’s friends were critical of Browne’s involving the young mother in his criminal business.

“What man would not think of the well being of his girlfriend?” one friend wrote on her memorial page.”Dam him for letting her be in harms way!!!!”

Jessica Illes’s story is equally disturbing. Although the young mother struggled with addiction for years, her slaying happened because of a conflict someone had with her boyfriend, Bobby Digeorgio, who was also killed.

“That was a hit related to her boyfriend,” Rich said.

While none of the recent murders of girlfriends have been solved, “they are priorities for us,” said Cpl. Dale Carr, of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team. “But these types of murders are inherently difficult to solve because they are related to gangs and organized crime.”

The threat of violence still doesn’t make women leave because they get isolated and lose their self-confidence, Rich said.

“If you have a young woman who, for whatever reason, feels desperate for love, you have a young woman who is looking for an easy way out of a difficult situation and wants instant gratification instead of deferred gratification, that is a person who is susceptible to these kinds of problems,” he said.

“They feel, in many cases, like they are stuck there.”

He said he has talked to mothers who are looking for help to get their daughters away from dangerous criminals.

“In one case, I had a very well-spoken, intelligent mother ... make contact with me and fellow members of the Abbotsford police, and ask for help for her daughter. The problem she was facing was that her daughter still had to make the decision to leave.”

Rich said his department is willing to do risk assessment and help young women find a safe place to go. But some of the women, he said, are suffering from a kind of Stockholm Syndrome.

“A lot of their own fear of leaving is generated by the person who doesn’t want them to leave,” Rich said. “There are some men out there that would be very, very dangerous to leave. You need to take real precautions to do it safely. You might need to be in a safe house for some of them.”

Shortage of services

Rich and Codoceo agree that there aren’t a lot of services for women caught up in the criminal underworld only because of a relationship.

Codoceo, who has trained as a social worker and worked for years with victims’ services, was first approached about 18 months ago by a girlfriend trying to get out. Since then, several more young women have contacted her and she has become an accidental specialist on the subject.

“A couple of them are out and the others are trying to get out. So they are not all in the same kind of stage. Their stories are so similar,” she said.

The young women were not “the really low self-esteem girls, the outcasts” when they hooked up with their dangerous men.

“It is high-achieving, brilliant young women. I think they get recruited in a different way because it is a sexy lifestyle. The cars. The money. The parties. The opportunities. The protection. It is an easier ride, so to speak,” Codoceo said.

The source of the new boyfriend’s wealth is deliberately obscured at first.

“When they realize what is going on, they are so deep into it that they don’t really know how to get out right away.”

And the boyfriends reassure them that “they are always protected. Nothing will ever happen to you: ‘You are different. You are special. You are my girl. I’ll look after you.’

“I had this one young woman and they promised to pay for her university. So here she was facing these huge student loans, thousands and thousands of dollars, and then there is this wonderful young guy who says, ‘You know what? No worries. We’ll pay for university,’” Codoceo said.

There are no guides for counsellors to help women in this situation, she said. And some traditional counselling methods don’t work. The young women don’t want to disclose much of what they’ve lived through for fear of retaliation. They don’t want to keep a therapeutic journal because they don’t want to write anything down.

“Most of these girls have witnessed multiple, multiple events,” she said.

Many assume the young women are responsible for their own problems, having taken up with a criminal.

But Codoceo said that in the early part of these relationships, the men often don’t disclose details of their life.

“It is so strategic in the way they are groomed. They are exposed to things at a very slow pace, so that one thing becomes okay, then something a little bit more severe happens.”

They might see someone beaten up and they come to terms with it. Later on, someone might show them a weapon.

“Then you see somebody with a gun to their head and you are kind of like, ‘Well, that’s not okay,’ but you are so desensitized to it that it becomes almost weirdly normal,” she explained.

The fact the girlfriends aren’t given body armour, she said, shows they are expendable in this world.

“They will drive the cars. They’ll do deliveries or whatever they need to do but they are not the one wearing the vest,” Codoceo said. “They’re told, ‘They won’t kill the girls, so you don’t really need a vest.’ Yet these girls are the holders of information, which makes them a huge safety risk.”

She said the girlfriends often have serious emotional trauma. “I hear stories of them going into drug houses with kids sitting there and them not doing anything about it. Of them watching people basically being beaten nearly to death and not doing anything about it because they can’t. And there is huge guilt that goes along with that.”

Some of the gangsters have put their girlfriends’ names on car contracts, apartment leases or even storage lockers used to stash illicit goods, Codoceo said.

“One of the young women I work with ... found out they used her name for so many things that she never even signed for. It can take years to slowly untangle yourself, especially if your name is attached to financial issues.”

As with Brianna Kinnear, many of the women turn to OxyContin to ease their pain.

“Any time you come off a drug like that and you have experienced and seen a lot of traumatic events, those traumatic events start to become a big deal — you have dreams and nightmares and flashbacks and you start to get the feelings of fear because of all of that unresolved trauma,” Codoceo said.

She would like to see a community plan implemented to help gangster girlfriends who want out.

“It is a community issue and it requires a community response and as community members we have to step up,” she said. “We need an integrated approach, where it is not just me alone as a counsellor, but where the counsellors that work with these women are connected to the police and to victims’ services.”

While there are parallels to domestic-abuse cases, Codoceo said gangster girlfriends are not just dealing with one abuser, but potentially all his associates.

“I have had clients before saying, ‘I am going to go to the Okanagan — I am going to leave my family and just go,’ and the next thing you know, two days later, there is a knock on the door and she’s been found. It is not as easy to get away,” she said.

“It is extremely violent and it is chaotic and it is super-abusive and most of them, when they get out, are shells of who they used to be. They don’t come out as that super-confident, popular girl.... They’re lost. It takes years to repair. It is like brainwashing.”

A need for safe places

Carol Kinnear doesn’t know what the answers are. She thinks a good start would be a special transition house for young women trying to leave criminalized boyfriends or husbands.

“There are safe houses for battered women and these girls are, in a sense, abused women.”

Brianna talked about going to counselling, but then she would change her mind.

“I think she lost some of her self-esteem. She lost some of her pride in who she was,” Kinnear said, tears welling.

“I knew that I was doing the best that I could to keep her out of it. It just wasn’t enough. We all pushed her and supported her so that she knew she had somewhere else to go.”

On Feb. 4, 2009, Kinnear awoke to a radio report saying that a 22-year-old woman had been gunned down the day before.

She winced, but she thought it couldn’t have been her daughter; the police would have contacted her by now.

She heard a little more on the news as she was getting ready for work. The victim was in a black pickup. Kinnear knew Brianna sometimes drove her friend’s truck. She pushed the thought away again and went to work.

At the office where she has worked for 23 years, she got a call from one of Margison’s friends, who said, “Carol, I have some bad news ...”

“As soon as he said that I started yelling.”

Kinnear headed to the police station with co-workers by her side. RCMP confirmed her worst fear. She also had to collect Ferdinand from the animal shelter. The tiny dog was in the vehicle with Brianna when the killer opened fire. He has never been the same since that day, barking incessantly at popping noises and sirens.

Margison sent Kinnear a text from jail the day after Brianna was killed.

“He said he was really sorry. You could tell by the text that he was really devastated.”

She went to see him once in jail, looking for answers. He gave her none.

Kinnear has not spoken to him since. She did not allow any of Brianna’s drug-world friends to attend her memorial service. Instead, old high-school friends who had lost contact with her packed the room, along with family members and their friends. Brianna would have been touched to see more than 260 people there, Kinnear said.

She keeps Brianna’s ashes in a beautiful pink-flowered urn on a china cabinet in her dining room.

“When her killer has been charged and goes to jail, then I will find a final resting place for her. Because she said always she felt safe here, I don’t feel she is going to be safe anywhere until this is all dealt with.”

On the couch she keeps a little stuffed teddy bear that Brianna made for her at a Build-A-Bear centre. When she squeezes it, she can still hear the sweet voice: “I love you, Mommy.”

Gangster girlfriends: Women trapped by fatal love

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